This is Rahul from the Midas Capital team!
jai thank you for the insightful questions here! Would love to provide our team's thoughts and help clear things up and instill confidence in our ability to deliver.
What is your team's backgrounds / qualifications to proceed with something like this?
We're a team led by three blockchain native individuals deeply embedded in the space with backgrounds spanning classical software engineering to Economics, with particular focus on smart contract development and incentive design. Specifically:
- Dom - Head of Business Development at Tixl, Degrees in Economics & Communication, Expert in tokenomics and game theory.
- Rahul - CTO at Connext. 10+ years of software development experience across Web2 and Web3 platforms. Highly experienced with Solidity development, worked on multiple DeFi projects, and launched many smart contracts into production. GitHub
- Carlo - Senior ML Engineer with 7+ years of experience in software development best practices, DevOps, machine learning, and more recently Web3. GitHub
What is the proposed level of collaboration between you guys / the Rari core contributors / the community? How are we to align incentives between these 3 parties?
- Midas <> Rari: PRs (code) - Midas offers to contribute their protocol improvements to the Rari codebase in the form of Github PRs (see more in 3.)
- Midas <> Rari: discussions around protocol improvements: Midas would love to become a contributor to the Rari governance, we think strong governance needs expert knowledge and people that are familiar with the intricacies of the protocol. Through our in-depth work with the codebase, we will be able to provide valuable feedback and ideas in Rari governance discussions.
- Midas <> Rari Community: As already stated in the original post, we think it would be best to deploy a new token to be able to gain traction through liquidity mining campaigns. Aave as well as their forks on other chains have proven that these campaigns can be incredibly efficient at bootstrapping liquidity and borrowing through the right incentive structure. We want to get tokens to not just the Rari DAO, but also to the Rari holders to make them active participants in the Midas DAO. Another idea is to use part of the Midas revenue to accumulate RGT tokens to further bind the two DAOs together in a symbiotic relationship. These tokens would allow Midas DAO to become an even more active participant in Rari governance, as well as act as a sinkhole for RGT tokens.
What are the long-term prospects? Beyond forking the codebase, what comes next?
As outlined in the initial proposal, our interest goes well beyond deploying just a "blessed fork" of the Rari Fuse implementation. As deep believers of the permissionless pool model as a fundamental building block of DeFi, we are interested in the continued improvement of the underlying software & protocol implementation. We believe that bringing good engineering practices will enable the whole community to benefit from it, as it will enable other teams to more easily build on top of it. As long-time contributors to open-source projects (feel free to check out our GitHub contributions), we understand the power of community-driven development.
In line with what has been mentioned, we see the possibility of deploying to BSC as an opportunity to master the Rari codebase and provide our input for continued improvement. We've already done our homework: we've started migrating parts of the codebase to TypeScript, implementing extensive unit-testing, and improving the local development by abstracting away configuration so that development against different chains (including a local ganache node) can be by simply setting the correct environment variables. These are improvements we see fit to be merged back into Rari's main branch, from which others in the community can benefit from.
Apart from the code improvements, the same can be said by our outlined improvements on the protocol side. While we plan on launching a "blessed fork", our implementation might also include changes outlined in the proposal. These will be open-sourced, and willing to be shared with the rest of the community.
As we briefly mentioned in the original proposal we had several other ideas on improving token mechanics and gamification of the Fuse implementation. These can involve the use of a liquidity mining program inspired by the C.o.R.E event by Tokemak or using Curve like Gauges to direct rewards toward different pools. We think a chain like BSC is the optimal test environment to see if these advancements have merit in a live implementation. Beyond that we see the usage of Fuse pools as community treasuries for DAOs/DeFi Protocols as a huge opportunity and want to help spread the word about this possibility onto other chains.
As Rahul and Dominik both come from an interoperability background, we see great potential in developing the Rari Vaults into a cross-chain feature that seeks the best yield for all types of assets through Fuse Pools on different chains.
why do you personally want to do this? there are only so few man hours in a day, everyone wants smart contract developers, your time is valuable -- why do you want to spend your time deploying on BSC? i genuinely want to hear your thoughts here. i have spoken to many people building on BSC and i am intrigued by the ecosystem but keen on hearing from your POV
Our personal view is that BSC provides the perfect testbed for the work we'd like to do: deep liquidity, cheap deployments (and usage fees), and a user base that is probably the most willing to try new things. We see it as the chain in which to launch an innovative DeFi primitive atop of which all the other protocols can build on. As reported by a few of the Rari founders, users have indeed been priced out of Ethereum main chain. While Polygon might provide an alternative, no other protocol benefits from the number of users and deployed assets as BSC.
Apart from the chain considerations, we are simply too intrigued by the Fuse model to not dedicate our time to it. We believe it to be the necessary evolution of lending pools, and believe that time spent pushing the vision forward to be time well spent. We are also incentivized by the possibility of independently evolving the protocol (in line with the community's interest) with our own ideas, some of which are also outlined in the initial post.
Apologies for the longwinded response, we sat down as a team and thought hard about your questions and really wanted to put our honest thoughts down and be transparent to the Rari community about our plans and thought process!
